1. See Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons: 1974), pp. 41-77. Laqueur corrects the popular one-sided view of Weimar culture as purely leftist by also analyzing the right-wing intellectuals (pp. 78-109), but the only imaginative writer of any stature he can adduce on the Right is Ernst Jünger.

2. Alfred Döblin, in his afterword to the reprint edition of Berlin Alexander-platz ("Nachwort zu einem Neudruck," BA 509). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

3. "Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins 'Berlin Alexanderplatz,'" Die Gesellschaft 7 (1930), pp. 562-66. Now in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 230-36.

4. Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler see in pre-World War I Expressionism the roots of the utopianism common in the early years of the Republic. Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshand-lung, 1978), 36-40.

5. The German title actually means "No Quarter Given." See below, Chapter 4, n. 1.

6. See Heidi Thomann Tewarson, Alfred Döblin: Grundlagen seiner Ästhetik und ihre Entwicklung, 1900-1933 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 58 and 83-84, for an intelligent exposition of the implicit parallels between Wang-lun and Wallenstein on the one hand and Wilhelmian Germany before and during the war on the other.

7. See Helmut Kiesel, Literarische Trauerarbeit. Das Exil- und Spätwerk Alfred Döblins (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986), pp. 207-9.

1. Louis Huguet calls this "Döblin's fundamental experience." See his Jungian interpretation of Döblin's early writings in "L'Oeuvre d'Alfred Döblin ou la Dialectique de l'Exode, 1878-1918," Diss. Paris-Nanterre, 1970, p. iii.

2. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 102-18.

3. Heidi Thomann Tewarson writes that in Döblin's early works, "Interpersonal relations are almost exclusively based on physical attraction, while psychic--i.e., intellectual or emotional--sympathy is as far as possible eliminated. Thus all relationships take on erotic characteristics, not just those be- soft

tween a man and a woman, but also those between two men or two women." Tewarson, Alfred Döblin, pp. 69-70.

4. He could have written this sketch, in which he is "approaching forty" ( SLW 14), between January and his birthday in August.

5. See the excellent "Döblin-Chronik" in Jochen Meyer, ed., Alfred Döblin 1878-1978, catalogue of the exhibit at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar, June 10-December 31, 1978 (Marbach: Deutsche Schiller-gesellschaft, 1978), pp. 15-21.

6. On the characterization of Döblin's marriage, see Robert Minder, "Begegnungen mit Alfred Döblin in Frankreich," Text + Kritik 13/14 (June 1966), p. 59. Bertolt Brecht writes of Döblin's "life with an uncommonly stupid and philistine woman"; Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, ed. Werner Hecht, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 605.

7. Armin Arnold, "Les styles, voilà l'homme! Döblins sprachliche Entwicklung bis zu 'Berlin Alexanderplatz,'" in Zu Alfred Döblin, ed. Ingrid Schuster (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1980), pp. 41-56, disagrees. He finds "Modern" an exercise in schoolboy rhetoric; only the theme is unusual (pp. 41-42).

8. August Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft) , 10th ed. (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1891).

9. Die literarische Welt 2 (May 21, 1926), p. 6, quoted by Klaus Müller-Salget in Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1972), p. 95.

10. See Heidi Thomann Tewarson, "Von der Frauenfrage zum Geschlech-terkampf: Der Wandel der Prioritäten im Frühwerk Alfred Döblins," The German Quarterly 58 (Spring 1985), pp. 208-22.

11. See Anthony Riley, "Nachwort des Herausgebers," JR 293-94.

12. Döblin mentions this setting explicitly along with the youth of the hero (and implicitly also of the author) in the essay of 1927, "Stille Bewohner des Rollschrankes" (Silent Inhabitants of My Desk Drawer): "At the beginning, the hero is in youthful, rural narrowness" ( AzL 357).

13. See Monique Weyembergh-Boussart, Alfred Döblin: Seine Religiosität in Persönlichkeit und Werk (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1970), pp. 88-89.

14. Tewarson, Alfred Döblin, pp. 21-22, contrasts the progressive position of Bebel to the antifeminist position of a writer like Strindberg, whom Döblin admired. Döblin, she writes, is basically antifeminist in his imaginative writings, though he occasionally espouses a progressive position in his journalism.

15. The influence of Italian Futurism on the Sturm circle and other Expressionists confirms Walter Laqueur's insistence that a good deal of what we consider "Weimar culture" was already fully developed before the First World War. Laqueur, pp. 110-13.

16. Der Sturm 104 (March 1912), p. 829; also quoted in Christa Baum-garth, Geschichte des Futurismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966), p. 28.

17. See Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory 1909-1915 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1978), p. 40: "Marinetti originally wavered between Dynamism and Futurism as names for his incipient movement."

18. Der Sturm 103 (March 1912), p. 823; also in Baumgarth, p. 182.

19. "Die Bilder der Futuristen," Der Sturm 110 (May 1912), pp. 41-42. Republished in Zeitlupe 7-11. break

20. See Baumgarth, pp. 166-71 for the "Technical Manifesto"; pp. 171-73 for the "Supplement"; and pp. 250-51 for "Battle: Weight + Smell," the French version of which was appended to the "Supplement" in Sturm 150/151 (March 1913), p. 280.

21. See Tewarson, Alfred Döblin, p. 54, who shows that Döblin's 1910 essay on the aesthetics of music, "Gespräche mit Kalypso. Über die Musik," already had established many of the aesthetic positions attributed in the secondary literature to the influence of Futurism.

22. Der Sturm 133 (October 1912), p. 195; Baumgarth, p. 168.

23. Der Sturm 133, p. 194; Baumgarth, p. 166.

24. Der Sturm 133, p. 194.

25. This point is also made by Winfried Georg Sebald, Der Mythus der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1980), pp. 129-30.

26. On the importance of Sachlichkeit, see Tewarson, Alfred Döblin, pp. 47ff.

27. Compare the similar remarks of the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo apropos the Futurists: "Ask any Futurist how he imagines speed, and on the scene will appear a whole arsenal of raging automobiles, rumbling stations, tangled wire, the clang, bang, noise and ring of the whirling streets. . . . This is not at all required for speed and its rhythms. . . . Look at a ray of sun--the quietest of the silent strengths--it runs three thousand kilometers in a second. Our starry sky--does anyone hear it?" Quoted by Linda Shearer, "Beyond Futurism: The Winston/Malbin Collection," in Futurism: A Modern Focus (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1973), p. 14, from Gabo-Pevsner (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1948), pp. 18-19.

28. Der Sturm 150/151 (March 1913), p. 280. Cf. Baumgarth, p. 251: "general-little island" and "bodies-watering cans heads-football scattering."

29. Tewarson, Alfred Döblin, p. 53, and Judith Ryan, "From Futurism to 'Döblinism,'" German Quarterly 54 (1981), p. 415, suggest that it was Mafarka that Döblin was criticizing in the "Open Letter." A close reading shows, however, that "Bataille" rather than the earlier novel was the object of his attack.

30. See Baumgarth, p. 63.

31. Der Sturm 104 (March 1912), p. 828; Baumgarth, p. 26.

32. Armin Arnold, Die Literatur des Expressionismus: Sprachliche und thematische Quellen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), pp. 62-69.

33. The connections between Futurism and fascism have been perhaps most convincingly argued by James Joll, Intellectuals in Politics: Three Biographical Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), pp. 133-78. See Giovanni Lista, Futurisme: Manifestes--Proclamations--Documents (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1973), pp. 22-33, for an informed apologia for the protofascist elements in Futurism. The resurgence of interest in Futurist painting and sculpture during the past twenty-five years, particularly at major exhibits in America (the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, the Guggenheim in 1973, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1980, the Yale University Art Gallery in 1983), and most recently at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 1986, has been accompanied by a tendency to minimize fascist or protofascist elements. There is some justification for this tendency in the case of the Futurist painters, since the original group--Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Severini, Balla--did not often glorify war or violence in their works. This phase of Futurism, called il primo futurismo, was in any event over by 1916, the artists having either died in the continue

war or left the movement (see Martin, Futurist Art, pp. xxx-xxxi). The tendency is to blame the younger postwar Futurists ( il secondo futurismo ), still led by Marinetti, for succumbing to fascism, as in this statement by Anne Coffin Hanson: "For many years full consideration of the movement has not been encouraged because of its late historical links to Italian Fascism. While early Futurist writings include elements which are not universally acceptable today, it is manifestly unsound to read history backwards and to invest the optimistic aspirations and energies of the first Futurists with the sinister overtones of events which had not yet occurred"; The Futurist Imagination: Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage and Free-Word Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983), p. iii. (Why "manifestly unsound," by the way, unless one rejects historical causality and the ability of ideas to influence subsequent events?)

34. Der Sturm 104 (March 1912), p. 828; Baumgarth, p. 26.

35. Der Sturm 104, p. 829; Baumgarth, p. 28.

36. Der Sturm 104, p. 829; Baumgarth, p. 26.

37. Marinetti, "Tod dem Mondenschein! Zweites Manifest des Futurismus," in Baumgarth, p. 240.

38. F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka le Futuriste: Roman Africain (Paris: E. Sansot, 1909), pp. viii-ix. This and all subsequent translations from Mafarka are mine.

39. This manifesto also mitigates the absolutism of the stylistic prescriptions in the "Technical Manifesto" and the "Supplement" and may have been meant as a reply to Döblin's "Open Letter," which appeared in Der Sturm in the same March issue that contained the "Supplement."

40. Umbro Apollonio, ed., Der Futurismus: Manifeste und Dokumente einer künstlerischen Revolution 1909-1918 (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1972), p. 120. The German text has "fünfzigprozentige Gleichberechtigung" for "full equality."

41. See Lista, Futurisme, p. 327.

42. French original reprinted in Lista, pp. 329-32. For more information on Valentine de Saint-Point, a grandniece of Lamartine, see Lista, pp. 51-57.

43. Baumgarth, pp. 237-39, emphasis in original.

44. Mafarka le Futuriste, pp. 30-31.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Ibid., p. 147.

47. Ibid., pp. x, xi.

48. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

44. Mafarka le Futuriste, pp. 30-31.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Ibid., p. 147.

47. Ibid., pp. x, xi.

48. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

44. Mafarka le Futuriste, pp. 30-31.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Ibid., p. 147.

47. Ibid., pp. x, xi.

48. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

44. Mafarka le Futuriste, pp. 30-31.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Ibid., p. 147.

47. Ibid., pp. x, xi.

48. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

44. Mafarka le Futuriste, pp. 30-31.

45. Ibid., p. 31.

46. Ibid., p. 147.

47. Ibid., pp. x, xi.

48. Ibid., pp. 281-82.

49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Bänden, vol. 1 (Munich: Hanser, 1967), p. 588.

50. Mafarka le Futuriste, p. 302.

51. Cf. Müller-Salget, pp. 29-31.

52. Leo Kreutzer, Alfred Döblin: Sein Werk bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1970), p. 21. It is Kreutzer who first drew attention to the suppressed first chapter of Wang-lun (now to be found in E 96-113, with the title "Der Überfall auf Chao-Lao-Sü"), which is much more overtly political than the alternate version that Döblin eventually chose. See Kreutzer, pp. 47-48.

53. Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik, p. 81. They go on to show how the popular culture of the Weimar Republic exploited the cliché in the variation of vamp and boyish femme enfant . Walter Laqueur, in his more narrative ac- soft

count of Weimar culture, seems to accept this stereotype as reality when he generalizes about Weimar women, "half vamp and half Gretchen," in Weimar, p. 32.

54. "Grün ist der Mai. Mit mancherlei schönen Blümelein gezieret sind Berg und Tal. Viele kalte Brünnlein rauschen, darauf wir Waldvögelein lauschen."

55. "Des Menschen Gemüt, hoch aufgeblüht, soll sich nun auch ergötzen zu dieser Zeit, mit Lust und Freud sich an dem Maien letzen. Und bitten Gott gar eben, er wolle weiter Gnade geben."

56. Ernst Ribbat, Die Wahrheit des Lebens im frühen Werk Alfred Döblins (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1970), p. 24.

57. Klaus Theweleit's study of the literature of the prefascist Freikorps movement following the First World War sheds much light on this phenomenon. Theweleit shows how proletarian women are automatically regarded as prostitutes, and that violence toward them is violence toward female sexuality in general. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 63-70, 171-204.

1. See Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), pp. 52-61.

2. Ibid., p. 61.

1. See Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1973), pp. 52-61.

2. Ibid., p. 61.

3. Bertolt Brecht, Tagebücher 1920-1922. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen 1920-1954 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 48.

4. Judith Ryan has addressed one such problem, that of the multiperspective narrative, in her article "From Futurism to 'Döblinism,'" German Quarterly 54 (1981), pp. 415-26.

5. See Werner Stauffacher, "'Komisches Grundgefühl' und 'scheinbare Tragik': Zu 'Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine,'" in Werner Stauffacher, ed., Internationale Alfred Döblin-Kolloquien ( = Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, ser. A, vol. 14) (Bern: Peter Lang, 1986), p. 170.

6. Matthias Prangel, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973), p. 33.

7. The final text of the novel does not clearly state why Gaby demands an introduction to Wadzek's daughter as the price of her aid in his stock maneuvers, but earlier manuscript versions show that Döblin conceived the relationship as a homoerotic one (see W 349, note to p. 39).

8. Brecht, Tagebücher 1920-1922 , p. 48.

9. Otto Keller, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1980), p. 205.

10. Although it is not explicitly stated, Wadzek's outward reactions (which are all the narrator gives us) suggest clearly that the "critical point" is the realization of his machine's inferiority: "The paper fell from his hand, he half fainted" ( W 30).

11. Keller, pp. 72ff. and 143ff., has drawn attention to the anticipatory parables in Wang-lun and Berlin Alexanderplatz . The past history of Schneemann, although not explicitly parabolical, occupies a similar position at the beginning of the novel and serves a similar purpose.

12. See for example Müller-Salget, p. 88. break

13. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 6-8.

14. See W 349-50, note to p. 40, on Döblin's frequent allusions to the Agamemnon story in his works.

15. He is thus interpreted by Hansjörg Elshorst, "Mensch und Umwelt im Werk Alfred Döblins," Diss., Munich, 1966, p. 27.

16. Kiesel, pp. 201-29, contains a thoroughly researched chapter on the meaning of psychopathology for Döblin's work. Kiesel writes of Döblin's "pathophilia" (p. 224) and asserts that his narrative style often imitates delusionary psychotic states in order to gain insight or "illumination."

17. Schuster and Bode, p. 61.

18. Klaus Schröter is undoubtedly right when he criticizes the novel for a surfeit of undigested symbolism in "Die Vorstufe zu Berlin Alexanderplatz . Alfred Döblins Roman Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine, " Akzente 24 (1977), p. 571. This also means a field day for a Jungian critic like Huguet, whose interpretation of the novel depends on the possession of detailed information about Döblin's private life.

19. For Roland Links, the broken mirror shows the "doubtfulness" of Wadzek's existence as a "completely rootless, alienated petit bourgeois, crushed by capitalist competition"; "The unbroken mirror image is a lie. Only in the shards lies the truth"; Alfred Döblin: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1980), pp. 59 and 60. Hansjörg Elshorst calls the mirror scene the "central point" of the novel and interprets its symbolism as showing that Wadzek and Schneemann are "interchangeable": "There is in reality no unmistakable, concrete individuality" (Elshorst, p. 25). Louis Huguet writes that Wadzek breaks the mirror and wounds himself as self-punishment for incestuous and patricidal wishes (Huguet, p. 711) although there is no mention of Wadzek's parents in the novel. I agree with Ernst Ribbat, who writes that Wadzek identifies with Schneemann's defeat in Stettin and in breaking the mirror "destroys his previous self" (Ribbat, p. 177).

20. See Kimberly Sparks, "Drei schwarze Kaninchen: Zu einer Deutung der Zimmerherren in Kafkas 'Die Verwandlung,'" Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 84 (1965), Sonderheft Moderne deutsche Dichtung, p. 78.

21. See Stauffacher, p. 179.

22. See the excellent notes in Anthony Riley's new edition of the novel, W 359.

23. Judith Ryan, pp. 419-20, shows how another urban description from Wadzek is a "correlative for the emotional state of the central character." That does not seem to be the case in the passage under discussion.

24. Links, Alfred Döblin, p. 60.

1. See Kreutzer, pp. 71-81, 134-47; and Sebald, pp. 14-58. During Döblin's exile in Paris, Arthur Koestler and Manès Sperber are reported to have called him the "Konfusionsrat" (Counselor of Confusion). See J. Strelka, "Der Erzähler Alfred Döblin," in The German Quarterly 33 (1960), p. 209, quoted in SPG 509.

2. See Sebald, p. 22, and Kreutzer, p. 76.

3. See Kreutzer, p. 82. break

4. The Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden, begun in 1960 by the Walter-Verlag with new volumes still being added, is the standard edition of Döblin's works. Under its current editor, Anthony Riley, it is approaching the status of a complete edition.

5. See Müller-Salget, pp. 12-15.

6. This is reminiscent of a passage about engineers in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: "Why do they like to stick tie-pins adorned with stags' teeth or small horseshoes in their ties? Why are their suits constructed like the motor-car in its early stages? And why do they seldom talk of anything but their profession? Or if they ever do, why do they do it in a special, stiff, out-of-touch, extraneous manner of speaking that does not go any deeper down, inside, than the epiglottis?" Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 38.

7. In January 1924, Döblin became a member of the "Gesellschaft der Freunde des Neuen Russland" (Society of Friends of the New Russia). See Meyer, p. 25.

8. See Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8. Pike writes that the city has always been an image of extreme ambivalence in Western culture, but that the scales tipped toward a negative image during the rise of industrialism in the nineteenth century. Döblin's essay attempts to counteract this negative image.

9. Pike, p. 88, points out that the topos of the city versus the country, conventional since Vergil, declines in importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The city becomes the primary setting of modern man.

10. See Sebald, pp. 140-41.

11. Biberkopf also represents an implicit critique of the bourgeois urban aesthete who is the typical hero of the nineteenth-century city novel, including Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov. See Pike, p. 100.

12. Quotations from Berlin Alexanderplatz will be referenced to both the German edition (= BA ) and to the English translation Alexanderplatz Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976) = EJ. In some cases, it has been necessary to make changes in the Jolas translation.

13. Volker Klotz, Die erzählte Stadt. Ein Sujet als Herausforderung des Romans von Lesage bis Döblin (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), p. 397, manages to compress the plot into one--albeit fairly complex--sentence.

14. Theodore Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 128-29, points out the probable travesty of Friedrich Hebbel's play "Gyges and his Ring," based on the legend of Gyges and Candaules in Herodotus.

15. Keller, Döblins Montageroman, analyzes the montage technique in The Black Curtain and Wang-lun as well as in Berlin Alexanderplatz .

16. Ekkehard Kaemmerling, "Die filmische Schreibweise," in Matthias Prangel, ed., Materialien zu Alfred Döblin. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 185. Pike, p. 9, writes that it is natural to perceive a city as "a cacophony of impressions."

17. Werner Welzig in his survey of the twentieth-century German novel arranges his material thematically and treats under the rubric "City Novel," his most meagerly represented category, only one work besides Berlin Alexander- soft

platz, Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras (1951). Welzig, Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1970), pp. 111-20.

18. Pike, The Image of the City, p. 132, writes of the "stubborn spatiality of the city."

19. This important distinction in point of view has been made by Müller-Salget, p. 295, and again by Keller, p. 145. The overwhelmingly chaotic impression of the first chapter has misled many commentators into treating it as the novel's primary mode for viewing the city.

20. See Keller, pp. 143-52. Keller sees in the story the Jews tell Biberkopf a parable of central importance for the novel.

21. Döblin's pronouncement in "The Structure of the Epic Work" that "It makes no difference and is a purely technical question, whether the epic author writes in present, preterite, or perfect tense" ( AzL 111) means only that choice of tense cannot be legislated and has no effect on the epic's "presence." Technique, of course, has a decisive influence on meaning. Müller-Salget, p. 120, points out the importance of the only narrative sentence in present tense in the whole of Wang-lun .

22. To my knowledge, the only time Döblin uses the word "montage" is in a 1947 letter to Paul Lüth ( Briefe 377).

23. Dietrich Scheunemann, Romankrise: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der modernen Romanpoetik in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1978), pp. 167-74, 182-83.

24. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 230-36. The two passages quoted below occur on pp. 232 and 233.

25. Scheunemann, p. 176.

26. While passages from this chapter are often cited in the secondary literature, it is treated systematically, to my knowledge, only by Klotz, pp. 375-80. In many cases, I have come to similar conclusions, but with differences in emphasis significant enough to warrant a second look. Müller-Salget, pp. 335-39, analyzes the montage at the beginning of book 5 as exemplary of all the others, because his main concern is to show how closely the "big city episodes" are related through theme, motif, imagery, and anticipation or recapitulation to the rest of the novel. Breon Mitchell, James Joyce and the German Novel 1922-1933 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 131-50, argues convincingly that Döblin's reading of Ulysses influenced his technique in Berlin Alexanderplatz . On pages 138-39, Mitchell shows how Döblin changed book 2, chapter 1, after reading Ulysses .

27. Müller-Salget, p. 121, points out the comparable natural rhythms of season in Wang-lun .

28. Mitchell, p. 139, suggests that Döblin borrowed this device from Ulysses . Cf. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: The Modern Library, 1961), p. 116.

29. Marilyn Sibley Fries, "The City as Metaphor for the Human Condition: Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)," Modern Fiction Studies 24 (Spring 1978), p. 44, notes this natural choice of a square to concentrate a fictional presentation of a city, while Klotz, p. 377, calls it "simultaneously the point of departure, arrival, and transfer."

30. There are several feuilletons and short essays from the twenties in which Döblin treats this eastern quarter of Berlin. Their tone is consistently celebratory of the diversity and energy of its life, while not denying its darker side. One often encounters here motifs from reality which were later incorporated into the fictional city of the novel. Thus, in "Berlin und die Künstler" continue

(Berlin and the Artists) from the Vossische Zeitung, No. 180 (April 16, 1922): "in the Brunnenstrasse, the AEG: a delight!" (now collected in Zeitlupe 59). See also "Östlich um den Alexanderplatz" (In the East around the Alexanderplatz; 1923) in Zeitlupe 60-63, which includes as important a motif as a young man singing "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" in a back courtyard, as well as "Großstadt und Großstädter" (The Big City and its Inhabitants), Zeitlupe 225-44.

31. They are not "pictorial symbols of the main facets of commerce in the city," as Mitchell calls them in James Joyce and the German Novel, p. 138.

32. Klotz, pp. 375-76, calls them "a summary of the total city" and comments, "the epically organized city legitimizes itself through the officially organized city." Keller, p. 145, calls the city here "a thoroughly ordered whole . . . a community formed by the human spirit . . . a living alliance."

33. Fries, pp. 46-47, seems to suggest that the list provides an arsenal of metaphor for the novel, and Klotz, p. 375, overstates the case when he says that the list "includes all possible institutions of this urban community." The emblem which seems most out of place both in the list and the novel, the Greek head symbolizing "Art and Culture," plays a humorously modest role when Biberkopf's friend Meck makes fun of him for joining a peddler's association although he has nothing to peddle. Meck says he may as well sell mouse traps or "plaster heads" and Franz answers, why not? ( BA 63, EJ 68).

34. Again, connections can be made to Biberkopf. The building permit is related to the constant demolition and construction going on throughout the novel, and the license to hunt wild rabbits in the Fauler Seepark anticipates the refrain "The chase, the pursuit, the damned pursuit" ( BA 442-43, EJ 559-61) that runs through Franz's head just before his arrest.

35. Biberkopf is later shown studying similar announcements on a Litfass pillar on the Alexanderplatz ( BA 186, EJ 226).

36. Jürgen Stenzel, "Mit Kleister und Schere. Zur Handschrift von Berlin Alexanderplatz, " Text + Kritik 13/14 (June 1966), p. 43. Cf. Mitchell, pp. 137-38.

37. Klotz, p. 379, asserts that the narrator here adopts his "omniscient role," but it is only a virtuoso pretense of omniscience, presented with a good deal of tongue-in-cheek.

38. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 1.

39. Fritz Martini, Das Wagnis der Sprache. Interpretationen deutscher Prosa von Nietzsche bis Benn (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1954), p. 360.

40. Ekkehard Kaemmerling undertakes to show specific cinematic techniques utilized by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz, even claiming--without supporting evidence--that Döblin was directly indebted to the montage theories of Eisenstein and Pudovkin (Kaemmerling, p. 191). He says that only a "reader-cineaste" can fully understand all the cinematic techniques used in the novel (pp. 197-98). In contrast, Erich Kleinschmidt, the editor of Döblin's collected dramas, radio plays, and film scripts, has written that "for his epic theory, the formal possibilities of film had a fruitful, if not a decisive effect" (Kleinschmidt, "Nachwort," DHF 653).

41. Klotz, pp. 381-82, states incorrectly that the chapter "ends with the conversation of two failures in a corner pub."

42. Cf. Kaemmerling, p. 196, who describes a similar passage ( BA 267- hard

68, EJ 333) as "referring to its origin in a filmscript," without showing why it couldn't just as well have come from a playscript.

43. Mitchell, pp. 138-39, argues convincingly through analysis of the Berlin Alexanderplatz manuscript that the chapter originally consisted of only section 3, and that sections 1 and 2 were added after Döblin read Joyce's Ulysses .

44. Timothy Joseph Casey, "Alfred Döblin," in Expressionismus als Literatur. Gesammelte Studien, ed. Wolfgang Rothe (Bern: Francke, 1969), pp. 637-55, calls the novel "decidedly ordered by statistics" (p. 647).

45. Klotz, p. 382, breaks off his analysis of this chapter after what I have called the second section, but treats the narrator extensively elsewhere.

46. See SLW 142-70.

47. Casey, p. 646, injects a word of caution: "The teacher has thrown out the baby with the bathwater, has denied the Furies of guilt along with those of fate." True, but Krause is also clearly posturing in this statement, and admits to having felt enough guilt to try to commit suicide.

48. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, "Der Wissende und die Gewalt. Alfred Döblins Theorie des epischen Werkes und der Schluss von Berlin Alexanderplatz, " in Prangel, ed., Materialien zu Alfred Döblin, p. 169. Cf. UD 418.

49. Döblin is here quoting the text of a socialist song, " Das sind wir Arbeitsmänner, das Proletariat ."

50. Martini; Welzig; Erich Hülse in Möglichkeiten des modernen deutschen Romans, ed. Rolf Geissler (Frankfurt: Moritz Diesterweg, 1962), pp. 45-101. Roland Links presents a specifically Marxist variation on this interpretive line by defining Berlin as a capitalist metropolis ( Alfred Döblin, p. 124) and charging that the end of the novel, although urging solidarity with the marching masses, does not become sufficiently Communist in its call (p. 126).

51. Klotz; Müller-Salget; and Casey. Albrecht Schöne, "Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz, " in Benno von Wiese, ed., Der deutsche Roman. Vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1963), pp. 291-325, represents an exception to the general rule. Although strongly emphasizing the "great theme of submission" to one's fate (p. 308), he contests Martini's assertion that the world of the novel is fragmented (p. 316).

52. Bayerdörfer, p. 163, accepting the thesis of the city as chaos, nevertheless asserts that by the end of the novel, Biberkopf has achieved a political consciousness equal to that of the narrator. I would argue that urban and political consciousness reinforce each other. A politically aware Biberkopf will also be alive to the social potential of the city.

53. Benjamin, pp. 235-36, implies that Biberkopf's loss of "fate" represents an aesthetic faltering which in the end degrades Biberkopf to the status of a hero in a bourgeois Bildungsroman .

54. Keller, p. 144, interprets all the figures who appear in book 2, chapter 1, as parallel to Biberkopf in the sense that they are also trying to "conquer the city." This seems to me to go too far. It is only Biberkopf who has vowed to be decent and to survive on his own. If all these figures are "battlers, conquerors and failures," then the gesture of "conquering the city," which Keller interprets as Biberkopf's basic hubris and weakness, is reduced to simply an equivalent for "living." break

55. See Prangel, Materialien , p. 54. While Döblin may not have written the dust jacket copy, he used the same phrase in an interview: Franz learns "that what's important is not to be a so-called decent person, but to find the proper comrade" ( SLW 180).

56. At the same point in the novel, Death calls him "Pope Biberkopf" ( BA 479, EJ 605).

57. Robert Minder, "Alfred Döblin," in Hermann Friedmann and Otto Mann, eds., Deutsche Literatur im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Wolfgang Rothe Verlag, 1954), p. 295.

58. Cf. Ziolkowski, Dimensions , pp. 120-31.

59. See Sebald, pp. 89-91, who interprets the bread-baking metaphor as a mythical initiation into social conformity.

60. See Müller-Salget, p. 310.

61. See Kathleen Komar, "Technique and Structure in Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz," The German Quarterly 54 (May 1981), pp. 322-23, on the echoes of Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 in this last paragraph. As Komar notes, the biblical parallel tends to universalize rather than particularize the call for solidarity.

62. James H. Reid, " Berlin Alexanderplatz --A Political Novel," German Life and Letters 21 (April 1968), p. 221.

63. Bayerdörfer, pp. 156-65.

64. Bayerdörfer, p. 163.

65. Bayerdörfer, pp. 163-64. It seems wrong, however, to say that "In the final chapter Döblin has gone out of his way to make the constellation of contemporary political parties visible to the eye of the reader" (p. 164). This is precisely what he has not done, and it is the reason that the final chapter has caused such confusion.

66. Minder, "Alfred Döblin," p. 295.

67. Keller, p. 149.

68. Links, Alfred Döblin , p. 115; Müller-Salget, p. 315; Keller, pp. 165 and 174.

69. Ziolkowski, Dimensions , p. 129.

70. Helmut Kiesel dubs these female figures "with a dual 'disposition' to erotic and religious redemption" Madonna Lisa , a phrase he borrows from Rilke (in the poem "Und du erbst das Grün" in the Stunden-Buch ). "The most complete realization of this type in Döblin's work, the synthesis of saint and whore from which all contradiction has been eliminated, is . . . Emilie Parsunke from Berlin Alexanderplatz " (Kiesel, p. 469).

71. About Biberkopf's childhood we learn only that with his mother and siblings, he pasted decorations onto painted eggs to earn money ( BA 267, EJ 332).

72. I have had to revise the Jolas translation considerably in this passage to make it conform to Döblin's original. Jolas follows Revelation 17:1-6 in the King James Version too closely and Döblin not closely enough. See Helmut Schwimmer, Alfred Döblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1973), pp. 117--18, for a comparison of this passage with the Luther translation. Döblin's main changes are a switch from first to second person and from preterite to present. break

1. All quotes from the novel will be referenced to both the translation ( MWM ) and the German original in the Ausgewählte Werke edition ( P ). The novel's German title is Pardon wird nicht gegeben (No Quarter Given). The decision to change it in the English translation is unfortunate, since the title phrase becomes a leitmotif in the novel. It has occasionally been necessary to make changes in the translation.

2. Manfred Auer, Das Exil vor der Vertreibung: Motivkontinuität und Quellenproblematik im späten Werk Alfred Döblins (Bonn: Bouvier, 1977), p. 33, writes of a "reduction in the realms of structure, narrative technique, style and theme."

3. Auer, p. 33, argues that the basic theme is the "battle of the individual for self-affirmation" (p. 33), principally in the private sphere of the family, and that the connection between familial and political struggle is not causal (p. 37), but only "figurative" (p. 33).

4. See Prangel, Alfred Döblin , p. 81; and Klaus Schröter, Alfred Döblin in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1978), p. 123.

5. "Nachwort des Herausgebers," P 373.

6. Kiesel, p. 58, characterizes it as a "document of poetic resistance to psychoanalysis and of the dubious value of 'writing as therapy.'"

7. See David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917-1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 232-36.

8. "Wo gehobelt wird, fallen Späne" (When you plane you get shavings): Noske's words at the Social-Democratic Party convention in June 1919 in defense of the mass executions in Berlin. See WV 291, note to p. 23.

9. See SPG 92.

10. Kiesel, p. 56, says the passage is "psychologically understandable, but politically and morally indefensible." This is a particularly strong statement from Kiesel, whose thesis is that Döblin's central motif since 1918 is "sorrow at destruction and man's lust for destruction" (p. 17).

11. Kiesel, p. 56.

12. See Tewarson, Alfred Döblin , pp. 99-111.

13. Quoted in SPG 488-89.

14. See Kreutzer, pp. 134-47, for a good account of the controversy.

15. See Briefe 476, and Klaus Petersen, Die "Gruppe 1925": Geschichte und Soziologie einer Schriftstellervereinigung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981).

16. See DHF 616-17 and 625.

17. Müller-Salget, p. 360.

18. See Kreutzer, pp. 134-62.

19. See Wulf Koepke, "Alfred Döblin's Überparteilichkeit. Zur Publizistik in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik," in Thomas Koebner, ed., Weimars Ende: Prognosen und Diagnosen in der deutschen Literatur und politischen Publizistik 1930-1933 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 321-23. Koepke sees in Know and Change! the influence of Karl Mannheim's analysis of the intelligentsia in Ideology and Utopia .

20. Kreutzer, p. 146. break

21. Heinz Graber, "Nachwort des Herausgebers," WV 313.

22. Cf. UD 473.

23. Auer, p. 33, says the familial battle is a "paradigm for the entire society."

24. Auer, p. 33, calls the mother-father conflict a "dominating leitmotif."

25. Typical of the latter approach is his socio-criminological study of an abused proletarian wife who, together with her female lover, poisoned her husband, Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, n.d. [1925]), reprinted as vol. 289 of the Bibliothek Suhrkamp (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).

26. Walter Muschg speaks of the novel's "heathen tragedy of fate" and "the air of Greek tragedy" surrounding the mother ( P 380); Roland Links writes that Karl's destiny "is fulfilled with the logic of a Greek tragedy," Alfred Döblin , p. 157.

27. "The seducer's name is José, of course" (Müller-Salget, p. 371).

28. The Blewitt translation is misleading in this passage. It should read: "And if he had formerly left his flat in the evenings to wander about the streets, to vanquish José and Julie and to exalt himself above them . . . he was now impelled towards something that was called Paul."

29. This point is also made by Walter Muschg in his afterword to the German edition of the novel ( P 379).

30. Links, Alfred Döblin , pp. 162-63, suggests that this broad appeal reflects the antifascist front Döblin could see forming in Paris in 1934, but of course the blurring of the distinction between workers and middle class was already central to Know and Change!

31. Kiesel, pp. 288-90, remarks insightfully that Döblin's idea of a "partisan" historiography owes more to Nietzsche's essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" than it does to Marx. Kiesel sees Nietzsche's category of a "monumental history" appropriate to "active and striving men" reflected in the figures of Rosa Luxemburg and Woodrow Wilson in November 1918 . Döblin presents them in a pathetic style that sometimes deteriorates into colportage.

32. Links, Alfred Döblin , p. 163, says he "sometimes acts like a caricature of Nietzsche's Superman."

33. Manfred Auer disagrees, interpreting the sociopolitical aspect of the novel as of minor importance. He seems to miss the mark when he says that "it is never a question of Karl making a basic choice between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat" (Auer, p. 36). We have seen that Döblin rejects these Marxist categories. Karl certainly does make a choice between the more general categories of the oppressed and the oppressors, joining the latter as a successful businessman and returning to the former at the end of the novel.

34. A garbled version of this English proverb is introduced into the conversation in which Wadzek uses the metaphor of the ship ( W 237).

35. The Blewitt translation of this passage is inaccurate.

36. The Blewitt translation of this passage is inaccurate.

37. E.g., Links, Alfred Döblin , p. 161; and Klaus Schröter, Alfred Döblin , p. 123, where he also calls the novel "the high point in Döblin's imaginative writing."

38. See Auer, p. 35: the circularity of the plot is carried out "ad absurdum." break

1. Because of the complicated history of its composition and publication, there is disagreement about whether the work should be called a trilogy or a tetralogy. Auer, pp. 57-63, argues persuasively that Döblin conceived it as a trilogy (cf. Briefe 231) and only divided the middle part in two volumes because of its length. Heinz Osterle, the editor of the new edition (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), argues for the designation "tetralogy" (cf. Briefe 318). Since his edition is in four volumes, I will refer to November 1918 as a tetralogy. In any case, it should be understood that the "trilogy" published between 1948 and 1950 (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber) is not the complete November 1918. Bürger und Soldaten (Soldiers and Citizens), the first volume published in Amsterdam in 1939 and Döblin's last work to be published until after the Second World War, could not be included in the Karl Alber edition. The censors of the French occupying forces refused permission to publish it, apparently because of its setting in Alsace, and it was reduced to a "prelude" to Verratenes Volk (A People Betrayed). The recent English translation by John Woods regrettably deletes the first novel without comment and even without the prelude from the postwar Munich edition.

2. This is sometimes implicitly regarded as the official "end" of the novel's time frame. See Anthony W. Riley, "The Aftermath of the First World War: Christianity and Revolution in Alfred Döblin's November 1918 ," in Charles N. Genno and Heinz Wetzel, eds., The First World War in German Narrative Prose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 95.

3. Hermann Broch, in the last novel of his trilogy The Sleepwalkers , also chose a small-town setting to help give coherence to his multistranded narrative of the war's end.

4. Quotations from the tetralogy will be referenced first to the German edition ( November 1-4), then to the English translation ( Woods 1 and 2). The following chart shows the relation of the German edition to the Woods translation:

1. Bürger und Soldaten   (not included; translations my own) 2. Verratenes Volk   1. A People Betrayed 3. Heimkehr der Fronttruppen 4. Karl und Rosa   2. Karl and Rosa

5. See Auer, pp. 65-68.

6. See Kiesel, p. 297.

7. Auer, p. 69.

8. Auer, p. 68.

9. Cf. the section of Unser Dasein entitled "Einer liest Zeitung" (A Man Reads the Newspaper), where newspapers are already regarded as symptoms of an inauthentic and enslaving modern society ( UD 426-30). Döblin had thus come to this conclusion by the early thirties.

10. In the original der Staat (the state).

11. The "Monologue of the Spree" was also possibly inspired by one of the few fictional, nondocumentary scenes in Walter Ruttman's 1927 film "Berlin, continue

Symphonie einer Großstadt," in which a wild-eyed suicide flings herself from a bridge into the river.

12. John Woods translates "vieles, was dazu passte" as "many things that fit his mood," but the only real antecedents for dazu are the "schönes Bild" and its metaphor, the ant colony.

13. Keller, pp. 142-44.

14. See Komar, p. 321. Komar writes that the old Jew is referring to Biberkopf, not to Berlin, when he quotes from Jeremiah ( BA 19, EJ 13). In November 1918, it is clearly the frivolous city being indicted through the words of the prophet.

15. See Kiesel, pp. 275 and 331.

16. Cf. Kiesel, p. 291.

17. See Roland Links, "Mit Geschichte will man etwas. Alfred Döblin: 'November 1918,'" in Sigrid Bock and Manfred Hahn, eds., Erfahrung Exil: Antifaschistische Romane 1933-1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1979), p. 340. Links says Döblin's purpose in this passage is to "alienate" the reader from the action in order to establish an "agreement" between reader and narrator.

18. See Kiesel, pp. 341-42, who calls the three basic narrative modes satirical, ironical, and passionate ( pathetisch ). His assignment of these modes to different groups of characters is somewhat problematic. Not all historical figures, for instance, are treated satirically.

19. This realism was noted by an early reviewer. See Schuster and Bode, p. 409.

20. See Auer, pp. 65-70, for Döblin's tendentious use of documentary material.

21. See Gay, pp. 8-13, on this common pattern of enthusiasm and disappointment. See also Auer, p. 66.

22. Sebastian Haffner, Die verratene Revolution: Deutschland 1918/19 (Bern: Scherz Verlag, 1969).

23. See Links, "Mit Geschichte will man etwas," p. 345.

24. Ebert's measure of guilt continues to be debated even today among historians and within the ranks of the contemporary German SPD (see, for instance, Brigitte Brandt's review of Heinrich August Winkler's history of the German workers' movement from 1918 to 1924 in Der Spiegel, May 27, 1985, pp. 34-43). The consensus among Western historians seems to be that Ebert and Noske were correct in their aims (to curb left-wing rebellion in order to stabilize both internal and external politics) but misguided in their means (cooperating with reactionary generals and allowing the formation of Freikorps). Cf. for example Arthur Rosenberg, A History of the German Republic, trans. Ian F. D. Morrow and L. Marie Sieveking (London: Methuen, 1936), pp. 50-51 and 80-83; Gay, p. 19; Morgan, p. 216. On the other side there is Haffner, p. 10: "The German Revolution of 1918 was a Social Democratic revolution that was suppressed by the Social Democratic leaders, a unique occurrence in the history of the world."

25. The English translation fails to include the first adjective in the series: langsam (slow).

26. See Arthur Rosenberg, Imperial Germany: The Birth of the German Republic 1871-1918, trans. Ian F. D. Morrow (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 270: "The chief aim of the military revolution was to assure peace by abolishing the power of the officers." break

27. See Links, "Mit Geschichte will man etwas," p. 342 and Kiesel, pp. 280-81.

28. See Auer, pp. 70ff., for another instance of such indirect narrative comment through juxtaposition.

29. Actually, Radek was a Polish Jew, born Karl Sobelsohn in Lvov in 1885.

30. A contemporary reviewer of the first volume had already noted the irony of the title: "One would never speak of 'a French revolution'; people will always say 'the French Revolution,' and will not only know which one is meant, but also what it meant." A. M. Frey, quoted in Schuster and Bode, p. 369.

31. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 66.

32. Rosenberg, Imperial Germany, pp. 93-94.

33. Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations, p. 7.

34. See Keller, pp. 51-52.

35. Keller, p. 52.

36. It should be noted that only the Antigone story is a genuine prefiguration in Ziolkowski's strict sense, i.e., an ancient story that provides a "pattern of events" for a modern story. The parallels with Faust and Christ are less fully developed, more oblique. See Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations, pp. 8-10.

37. Heinz Osterle, "Alfred Döblins Revolutionsroman," afterword to Alfred Döblin, Karl und Rosa (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), p. 685, locates the "Faust parody" at the end of the entire tetralogy. As will be shown below, I interpret the end as a postfiguration of the story of Jesus rather than of Faust.

38. The entire Stauffer narrative has been deleted in the English translation.

39. See J. W. Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 720-807.

40. On the influence of Kierkegaard's Antigone-recreation in Either/Or, see Riley, pp. 104-5; Kiesel, pp. 475-76; and Heinz D. Osterle, "Auf den Spuren der Antigone: Sophokles, Döblin, Brecht," in Stauffacher, ed., Internationale Alfred Döblin-Kolloquien, pp. 96-97.

41. George Steiner, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 188-90, treats the classroom discussion, but does not mention the post-figurative recreation.

42. This is one of the very few times when the Woods translation seems wrong, translating Männchen as "a kept man." "Male of the species" is more accurate, and corresponds to the word Tierchen ("little animal") used for the women.

43. In her combination of purity and sensuality, Hilde conforms to the image of the "weisse Krankenschwester" (white nurse) in the prefascist Freikorps novels analyzed by Theweleit, pp. 90-100. See also Kiesel, pp. 465-69.

44. See Auer, p. 78.

45. Compare November 4:13-15, Woods 2:5-7, with Rosa Luxemburg, Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (Berlin: Verlag Junge Garde, 1920), pp. 37-38.

46. There is a photograph of him celebrating among the officers at the Eden Hotel after the murder. It was printed in the Spartacist newspaper Rote Fahne as part of its futile campaign to bring the murderers to justice. See J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. vii, 762.

47. J. P. Nettl, in the commentated bibliography appended to his ex- soft

haustive two-volume biography of Luxemburg, calls Karl and Rosa "a not insensitive but gaudy dramatization of Rosa Luxemburg's prison years . . . the story departs substantially from the truth and grossly over-emphasizes her love-life" (Nettl, vol. 2, p. 918).

48. See Nettl, vol. 1, p. 25, and   Elzbieta * Ettinger, introduction to Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. xvi-xviii.

49. Luxemburg, Briefe aus dem Gefängnis, p. 35. There is lively critical debate on the plausibility of Döblin's portrayal of Luxemburg. Müller-Salget, p. 378, and Heidi Tewarson, "Alfred Döblins Geschichtskonzeption in 'November 1918. Eine deutsche Revolution,'" in Stauffacher, ed., Internationale Alfred Döblin-Kolloquien, pp. 64-75, are critical. Riley, pp. 99-103; Links, "Mit Geschichte will man etwas," pp. 348-49; Auer, pp. 76-77; and Kiesel, pp. 401-2, defend Döblin's portrayal.

50. How astute Döblin was in choosing Luxemburg as the great representative figure of the German revolution, and how relevant she remains today for dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe, can be measured by the fact that the East German poet and performer Wolf Biermann quoted precisely this passage at the beginning of his concert in Cologne in 1976. Following the concert he found himself expatriated and denied reentry into the German Democratic Republic. See also Ettinger, p. xxxiii: "She alone among her contemporaries made a comeback in the 1960s as tanks rolled and shots were fired and people were fighting again for government 'with a human face.'"

51. Döblin himself, like Becker, saw a "weeping woman" in the cathedral of Mende, France, where his religious crisis occurred ( ASLA 189).

1. Auer, p. 160.

2. How foreign Döblin's Christianity was to his friends in exile is captured in Bertolt Brecht's bitterly satirical poem "Peinlicher Vorfall" (Embarrassing Incident), written after Döblin had hinted at his conversion at a Hollywood party for him on his sixty-fifth birthday in 1943: "the celebrated god . . . / Fell lewdly to his knees and shamelessly / Struck up a saucy hymn, thus offending / The irreligious sentiments of his listeners, some of them / Mere youths" (Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967], p. 862). How foreign Döblin's Christianity would be to younger German writers can be measured by Hans Mayer's characterization of postwar German literature--East and West—as a literature "without faith" (Mayer, "Literatur heute im geteilten Deutschland," in Werner Link, ed., Schriftsteller und Politik in Deutschland [Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1979], p. 127). break